Nutbox × SubQuery AMA (2021-09-14) Compilation
Briefly explain what is SubQuery?
Almost every blockchain has a need to process and query data. The thriving Polkadot community is going to need a service that allows them to reliably find and consume data quickly. So，SubQuery we want Making the world’s decentralised data more accessible.
SubQuery is a data-as-a-service provider that aggregates and organises data from Polkadot and Substrate projects, serving up well-structured data for developers to use for a wide array of projects. It operates between the layer-1 blockchains (Acala etc) and decentralised apps (dApps).
This service allows DApp developers to focus on their core use case and front-end, without needing to waste time on building a custom backend for data processing.
SubQuery allows every Substrate/Polkadot team to process and query their data. The project is inspired by the growth of data protocols serving the application layer and its aim is to help Polkadot/Substrate projects build better dApps by allowing anyone to reliably find and consume data faster. Today, anyone can query and extract Polkadot network data in only minutes and at no cost.
Who is in the core team of SubQuery?
So far, I am the only one in the team currently in China and I am honored to join the excellent team as the China representative.
Most of the other colleagues are in New Zealand, but also in the US and Australia. There are 26 people in the team and I would like to come and introduce a few key members mainly:
Sam Zou — CEO and Founder
Entrepreneur, Investors with more than 20 years of IT experience specialising in infrastructure and cloud service design
Ian He — Head of Protocol
Blockchain Architect, Contributor to polkadot-js, Early adopter of Substrate technology and won second place in the first Polkadot hackathon.
James Xu — Solutions Architect
Infrastructure & Application Architect, Award-winning software engineer.
James Bayly — Marketing and Partnerships
Software engineer with experience creating and growing 3 startups over the past 5 years
SubQuery's mission is to make decentralized data easier to use, so how does SubQuery achieve this
So let’s walk through it. A SubQuery project defines 4 steps.
Step 1 - You specify what data is extracted from the chain, you might choose to extract data from every block or only certain calls or events (like indexing each transfer event).
Step 2 - You then transform this data using mapping functions. Mapping functions take the chain data as an input, and then apply custom logic to each event. In the mapping function you can do anything, like calculate averages or combine different data.
Step 3 - You save it to a high performance database. This makes searching, filtering, sorting and querying that data much faster and easier. In your SubQuery project you define the shape of the data using a language called GraphQL - this is how you store and query data.
Step 4 - In the last step you can query this data. Anything can query this, it could be your new mobile app or a website, it could even be used by Oracles or provided as a data source for other blockchains - the possibilities are endless!
If you’re building a dApp on Polkadot - SubQuery means that you can skip building a server to manage your data!
SubQuery operates between the layer-1 blockchains (for example, Acala or Bifrost) and the application layer. Our service allows DApp developers to focus on their front-end, without needing to waste time on building a custom server for data processing.
The difference between SubQuery and other projects is that we’re actually a working product providing real data to real customers. For example, Karura is using SubQuery Data in their dApp - all the data that you see in Karura’s application is provided by a SubQuery project.
We’ve focused on building a product first, and since we’ve now built that product we’re working hard to share it with the world to make the lives of all developers much easier.
Why did SubQuery strive to be the core infrastructure of the Polkadot system from the beginning?
We saw Polkadot’s potential early and right from the start it felt natural to focus our efforts there.
It solves ethereum’s governance, forking, interoperability problems, and more. The core premise of Polkadot is to create a thriving community of developers, users, and businesses that will tap into its multichain interoperability — that community is going to need a service that helps them build better dApps by allowing anyone to reliably find and consume data faster.
For the web3.0 dream to be realised, it’s got to be as fast (if not faster) than centralised networks for the end user.
Polkadot’s unique architecture means that we can focus on one network and then be able to support multiple current and future chains automatically. By putting in this effort now, even as Polkadot is still under development, we will be there ready to help the next generation of blockchain developers create the next big dApp.
Kusama Slot auction is undoubtedly one of the biggest hotspots recently, we have seen some projects participating in the slot auction have established cooperation with SubQuery. Can you give us a detailed introduction?
Yes, I would love to introduce our partners. We’re already powering some of the top applications in Polkadot and serving over a million daily API requests, including; DeFi apps like Acala and Bifrost, wallets like Fearless Wallet, NFT platforms like KodaDot, cross-chain bridges like Darwinia, and analytics platforms like SubVis.
We think the opportunities for SubQuery are endless as you know.
The projects that won the first five slots in the first wave of the slot auction were all partners of our team.
Among them Acala, Moonbeam, Bifrost are using data services.
As they say，Our data services saved their developers roughly 60-70% of their data indexing time. They are using SubQuery Data in their dApp - all the data that you see in Their application is provided by a SubQuery project.
We've heard that the SubQuery service is completely free, but what about the benefits and value of the SubQuery project?
Well, You are very accurate. our service is completely free, but the data itself is very valuable, just like you go to Baidu to query Google without charge, but how valuable Google is, we all know. So what is the value of our project?
Let's refer to the benchmark in blockchain, The Graph of Ethernet ecology. it's a simple math problem. When did ethereum start getting popular?
In fact, it wasn't until DeFi became popular last year and the ensuing NFT became well-known that the value of the ethereum ecosystem was really reflected in the price, with the value behind it to support the price increase.
the Graph's hosting service handled over 10 billion queries in November 2020, reaching a 58% monthly growth rate since July and over 20 billion queries in April this year. Today the market cap of Ether is $360 billion and the Graph's market cap is $12 billion.
Where is Polkadot now? Currently, it's only one-ninth of Ethereum, but do you think the Polka ecosystem will surpass Ethereum? My answer is there may be chance of it, because it has more projects, faster, better ecology and less cost! So what will SubQuery's market cap be? I'll leave it to your imagination.
Will it overtake $ 12 billion? You can imagine!!!
I noticed that SubQuery had announced the $9million fundraising recently, how will you use it?
We have three primary goals, the first is to build a larger community . we want to be closer to the huge amount of development and amazing projects coming out of China so we can help them expand.
China is becoming a centre of Polkadot and blockchain development in the world. We want to make sure that we’re working closely with the community here to build the future. That’s why i am leading business development in China - it’s that important to us.
We attach great importance to building our community, a good project should involve more people.
Our second goal is all about expansion. SubQuery needs to be there to help every new developer start in Polkadot, when new developers come to Polkadot we want them to immediately start building applications powered by SubQuery.
When you go to the SubQuery website, you’ll find our SubQuery Explorer which allows you to browse through all the existing public SubQuery Projects that we host for free. We host them for free only if they remain public, meaning that everyone can see, learn, and be inspired by them.
We’re also working closely with hackathon partners and universities around the world. We are supporting hackathons with prize money, with challenges, with education material, and with lectures to help new developers start more easily. Blockchain is hard - and we all need to work together to make it easy and more accessible to new people.
Lastly, we need to make SubQuery better - that means faster and more decentralised. We’re making constant improvements to scale our managed service, and to provide a faster query service for our larger customers - we’re growing together. We’re only doing 10 million API requests each day at the moment, but at the end of the year we want to be doing hundreds of millions or API requests each day.
We’re scaling our production infrastructure to provide fast, reliable, and scalable data to our customers. This also includes adding new features that make SubQuery much more powerful, you’ll learn about these over the coming months.
At the end of the year, SubQuery is going to be powering all the top projects on Polkadot. We’re going to keep things open, so anyone (from the biggest company to a single developer working in Shanghai) can build and publish their own SubQuery for their own app.
In a nutshell, we want to spend our money on creating bigger communities and creating better programs
What is the competitive advantage of SubQuery over other similar projects?
Well, SubQuery is inspired by the growth of data protocols serving the application layer. We hope to differentiate ourselves from larger players in a meaningful and advantageous way.
Our main advantage over competitors is that we have expressed our commitment to focus on Polkadot and Substate from the day we started. Our service and tools were built from the outset to work with Substrate and we are already in the market helping some of the leading Substrate teams unlock the data in their own parachains.
While providing support on just Polkadot is easy, supporting hundreds of other Substrate-based chains with minimal custom development work will be our eventual goal in order to differentiate us from other platforms. We believe our relationships with all the top Substate teams will be essential to help us achieve this outcome.
Unlike other “unified” decentralised API service providers, SubQuery is open source, so you will have the freedom to define your data set specifically for your needs. Rather than having to combine queries from different API endpoints - you can define the shape of your APIs data models yourself.
It saves time, money, and provides a vastly better experience for your users. There are endless possibilities for the variety of data sources that can be analysed and served using SubQuery. We cannot wait to see what our community comes up with.
SubQuery doesn't have its own Token yet, will it in the future? If there will be so tokens, how will they be distributed?
First, we want to achieve the technical vision
We will aim to move towards a globally decentralised network of participants organising blockchain data in order to ensure no single point of failure for SubQuery. We expect that this will massively increase SubQuery’s uptime, provide better redundancy, and increase performance by driving down latency.
We envision that applications will be able to use GraphQL to query any store of data (as defined by the SubQuery Project) from Indexers around the network. SubQuery will aim to power the future plethora of serverless applications in the Polkadot/Substrate ecosystem.
Our guiding principle with the SubQuery Network is simplicity. It is our opinion that other approaches to decentralised data query services are overly complex and make it difficult for participants to predict their return on investment. Our aim is to make it easy for you to get involved in the network, and to clearly forecast your future potential return.
Secondly, after all this is achieved, perhaps in the first quarter of next year, we will tokenize, and of course what you can expect is that before then we will have a portion of the quota dedicated to the community so that more people can participate, and this will probably be after the Chinese New Year next year, so I hope you will keep watching our progress.
I think it will surprise you
If SubQuery and Nutbox are going to collaborate in the future, what aspect can we work on together?
This is a topic I particularly want to talk about, and I'm looking forward to our collaboration
Nutbox is a very high quality project that not only implements pledge and dao functionality on its own platform, but also combines social and defi, which I think is a very good features and much needed in the blockchain world.
SubQuery is officially created for developers to have more time to create such a good project. Our developers have also communicated many times, and I believe subquery can provide a good service when nutbox developers need more on-chain data indexing.For example, if nutbox defi part needs on-chain asset data from users, they can come to subquery to query it.
And nutbox also has a number of components built in to allow for easy deployment by the community. I think we can look forward to working together on this part as well. subquery is always committed to be a better data indexing tool, so I hope it can be easily used by everyone along with nutbox's component tools.
What is the future roadmap for SubQuery? Can you give a brief introduction?
A huge mission for us is to build the SubQuery Network. We do believe that a healthy decentralisation future requires multiple data service providers, that’s why we’re going to decentralise and tokenise the SubQuery Network.
In order to ensure no single point of failure for SubQuery, to massively increase our uptime, and to increase performance by reducing latency, we’re going to move a globally distributed decentralised network of participants organising blockchain data.
By the way, I would also like to introduce to you，We need help to build this future - it's a huge amount of work ahead of it. We need smart Rust and Solidity engineers to join us. If you want to work for one of the biggest Polkadot project, please join us on our mission! You can apply on our website.
https://www.subquery.network
There is a link to the Ambassador Program application on our website.
If you are interested you are more than welcome to join us
of course if you want to be an ambassador for China regions, you can also come to me directly.
According to the roadmap, what are your most important next priorities? Does your team have enough funds and strong community to achieve those milestones?
We just received $9 million in funding, which seems to be more than enough to achieve all our plans, and we will allow community investment until we tokenetize next year, so that more people can participate and share our good results.
Do you have tutorial videos so we can get to know your project more clearly or do you have a YouTube channel or something? can you share it with us?
Yes we have a lot of information, videos, on the website. And we have our own YouTube channel.
Please check out this link to learn more about us
https://linktr.ee/subquerynetwork
Helpful resources on the SubQuery network. We make it easy for blockchain teams and users to launch nodes and get access to a large range of blockchain protocols.
It's easy to make a token but it's really hard to make this token valuable. So what's your startegy to make your token more valuable and what's your plan to maintain token price and supply?
As I said earlier, the data itself is very valuable, and when our token mechanism is launched, we will make the value of the data linked to our tokens, so that developers who create data while using our indexing service, others can pay the developer our tokens to access the data. This will allow the relationship between the token and the value of the data
Compiled by:
Sook Jin Goh,
Nutbox Ambassador for Malaysia,
Director at Nanyang Global Scientific Research Centre
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